Getting a Great Guitar Tone
in your Sequencer

Using software to Tweak Your Tone

By the Tweak

I spent
my early days as a home recordist recording
electric and acoustic guitars, using beaten up guitars, tripped up reel to
reels and trashed out pedals. My more recent history involved
tweaking synthesizers and samplers in all varieties of sequencers, coming up with novel sounds
for my sample cd roms. This puts me in an unusual position to apply
things I know about filters and plugin chains to guitars in the sequencer.
To be sure, to get a great tone on guitar you have to know how to play one
(with nuance and feeling) and it helps if you
are familiar with working with pedals, amps, effects boxes and other guitar gadgets.
Many will argue that while software models have come a long way, sticking a
mic on a well tweaked amp is the tried and true path to Tone.
That does seem true, but..

The day has arrived when a recording
guitarist can go amp-less. (Tweak ducks for cover to avoid the airborne
broken pedals, wah-wahs, capos, and busted up tube amps hurled by the crowd.)
Yep! Throw it all over here, boys, you won't be needing it for recording
anymore. What! We have mixologists that are mixerless, computers
that are soundcard-less, and now guitarists that are amp-less. Look out
amp makers! Every year amp modeling software gets better, and its so good now
even the amp manufacturers have put amp models on their amps! They definitely
don't want to get buried in the graveyard of studio hardware. Of course
for playing live you still need a full rig of amps 'n stuff. But in the
sequencer, there are many, many more opportunities for tonal exploration that
go beyond amps (even those with models), floorboards, Pods, VAMPs than you may
have thought of in your quest for a unique Tone.

You can even expand your
sound beyond the time honored tones now made easy in amp modelers, which
portend to do it
all for you. But wait. There's more. You can, indeed, go down the path of creative studio
processing that the original guitar tweakers had visited. If you get
really good, you don't even need an amp modeler. What you do need is a
lot of processors and a relentless drive to experiment.

Using a Software amp modeler

A software amp modeler has some advantages
over hardware models like the VAMP2. You can monitor through the
software modeler rather than recording through it, like one does with a
hardware modeler. This means that while you hear the effects as you
play, you are still recording a perfectly dry clean tone, which opens up the
possibility of changing your amp model, as well as its tone controls and
effects, later on, all the way up to the moment when you commit to the mix.
Another advantage of using software modelers is that you can place them
anywhere in the chain, not only at the beginning. Instead of using the
modelers effects, you can use different effects from your plugin arsenal.
This gives you a shot a pre-conditioning your clean tone to get it ready for
the amp model, and putting other processors after the amp model. You do
need a fast computer for this, and an audio interface with very low latency.

In the sequencer it is easier to experiment
with sound than it is in the real world. With a dozen mouse clicks you
can reconfigure your plugin chain easily. You can save your plugin chains and
build your own custom tone library. For the sake of demonstration, I
will break the guitar channel down to 3 parts: Preconditioning,
Modeling, and Post-Conditioning.

enlarge Here you see a plugin chain I
have going right now in Logic 7. You can do this with any sequencer
that lets you chain plugins, and all the majors do.

As of Logic 9, even more software guitar processors are
added (click to enlarge)

Preconditioning

I like to start in mono. You can move
to stereo at anytime in the chain with most sequencers. I find it better to do
that after the amp model, in the post treatment phase. But there are no
rules here. I think keeping it mono through the modeler keeps the focus
on tone rather than on effect. That is important. Any monkey can
add reverb and delay, but a true tweak works like a chef. You season and
spice before you bake.

Ok, lets get going. Perhaps the
most obvious application is to get the dynamics sitting better before going
into a distortion unit. Using a common software compressor and gate can
go a long way here. Use the gate to cut out spurious notes and
accidental noises as well as any noise and hum coming from the guitar, then
add compression to get a bit more sustain out of the good notes. If the
gate is not enough, consider noise reduction plugins such as
SoundSoap
by Bias. This kind of plugin samples the noise then removes traces of it as
the audio streams through it.

Now let's talk EQ. You normally
would get different tones out of your guitar by using the Tone Controls (doh!),
which actually are nothing else but typical low pass filters, in essence
simple equalizers. Now imagine, instead of using your guitars simple
EQs, you decided to apply a big daddy studio parametric EQ. Which
gives you better tone? Go try it and then you tell me. One of my
favorites for guitar is the UAD Neve 1073 and the Pultec, which can be added
to your collection if you have a
UAD-1 card.
I like these because they do a lot to preserve the integrity of the signal.
So, stick in a good parametric style eq and leave it alone for now. After we
apply the model later on then we can go fine tune this EQ, and listen for the
dramatic changes it can make to the model.

Using synthesizer type filters is another possibility for adding a unique
tonality to a guitar track. While I can't talk about all the filter
types in this article, the ones I suggest using are the simpler low-pass
2-pole varieties with resonance. Resonance is a boost at whatever
frequency you choose. This kind of filter allows you to sweep the tone
through different frequencies with the filter cutoff knob. This can give an automated wah tone but in a
much wider range than a Wah pedal that had fixed resonance bandwidth points.
You can be subtle or extreme, as you, not Boss, is the boss! But I
suggest in the preconditioning phase that you be subtle. See we have not even
flipped on a model yet and already you have a better tone

Pitch correction is another thing that can
take place early in the chain. While people tend to think of these as
vocal intonation correctors, they can just as easily correct poor intonation
on your guitar solos, due to having a guitar that simply has poor intonation
or due to a tuning issue. We all know how crappy a solo can sound in the
12th position when half the notes are sharp and the other half are flat. That
problem is easily set aright. For most pitch correction plugins, you just
set the scale and the attack time, and the software will gently or abruptly
guide the note back to correct pitch. While I use the pitch correction plugin
in Logic most of the time, there are other plugins that might do a better job,
such as
Antares Auto Tune. Using automation you can turn correction on and off so
as you approach a pitch bend (which you usually do not want to correct) you
just automate the bypass switch. For severe problems like re-pitching a
duff note in a great solo, you can dump to an offline editor and make the
correction there with autotune.

Amp Models

There's lots of software modelers about
today. I really only have used one, but have used it a lot. That
one is Guitar Amp Pro which is bundled in
Logic.
There are others which are even more complete, such as Native Instruments
Guitar Rig
2 and
Guitar Combos. There is also IK Multimedia's
Amplitube

Typically the amp modeling software will give
you several presets of different amps and types of tone-applications, like
clean, crunch, distorted and metal. Using Guitar Amp pro as an example,
you can choose among a direct box, an SM57 and a condenser as the recording
transducer. You can even select whether the mic is centered or offf-centered,
then through the usual amp controls of gain, EQ, and FX. Not only can
you select the type of amp, but the cabinet model as well. The fun,
naturally, comes in the tweaking of tone and getting it just right for your
musical context.

Post-Conditioning

While many amp modelers may come with their
own delay and reverbs, you should not feel you have to use them.
There's so much great stuff out there I am just going to tell you the ones
I think
are well suited for guitar. Logic's Space Designer rates high in my
book. Not only do you get emulations of a huge variety of rooms and
halls, you also get emulations of many world class reverb and delay units from
the old chambers and plates to the modern high end units from unnamed famous
effects manufacturers. UAD's software model of the Roland RE 201
Space Echo is very cool, and it can give you the same character runaway
feedback that those who experimented with tape based effects will fondly
recall. The UAD model of the Boss Chorus Ensemble is
accurate. I used to have one. It's the god of shimmering
underwater tone. UAD's Phasor is not meant to model after the
MXR Phase 90, but it sure sounds close. The Plate 140 is very nice
and I am always in a quandry with it. Plate 140 or Space Designer?
They both are outstanding. PSP'sLexicon
PSP42 has got to be one of the wilder guitar delays on the planet. If
you like wild, check out the Ohm-boys stuff.
Isotope's Trash and Logic's Bitcrusher can give new dimensions to amp
distortion.

Setting Up the Chain

Setting up post conditioning involves some
basic routing decisions. While preconditioning plugins are best used as
insertsbefore the amp modeler, post conditioners can be put in as inserts
after the modeler and may use the sends and returns of of a software bus.
Note in the example to the left that after the amp modeler "GtrAmpPr"
I have a
Boss Chorus Ensemble. On bus 1, I have Space Designer for reverb and The
Space Echo on Bus 2. In this example the guitar channel is mono till it
reaches the Chorus Ensemble. The FX busses are both stereo. The
final tweaked guitar track and the returns arrive on the master bus where they
are summed with all the other tracks.

Automation Possibilities

Unlike real world guitar chains with their
footswitches, pedals and knobs, you can do a lot more with automation than
simply turning things on and off. You can fade effects in gradually,
slowly move from clean to distorted and alter the character of the distortion
halfway through a guitar solo if you want. Its really with the power of
automation that you can enter into new guitar worlds and take the instrument
beyond convention.

Tonality Exotica

Lets not forget that many of today's software synths can be
used as an effects bus too, and that opens up a whole new world of exotic filters and
LFOs. Many of you probably already have a ton of tools that can be used.
The Korg Legacy comes with models of vintage synths that can process an audio
input from any source in your sequencer. Vocoders offer a different
perspective on tone, particularly when automated. With exploration you
may be able to achieve a tasteful sounding talking guitar tone.

Effects without plugins.

Yes it is possible. Remember that
chorusing, flanging, delay and feedback are effects that originally were
tweaked on 3 head reel to reel machines. You can simulate this by simply
copying your track to another track and giving one a tiny delay offset.
What happens, you ask, if you add different processors to clones of the same
original track? Now you are thinking! What happens if you take a
phrase, reverse the audio, apply an effect, record the effect only, then flip
it back? Ghostly. Like distortion? Don't use gates, use a single
coil, ramp up the gain then run through a bitcrusher and a couple of
compressors after as well as before the modeler. It'll sound just like
my old tube amp (the ShockMaster!) did before it exploded. Thank god I
don't need it anymore.